I have been working on a novel called Avenging Angels for about a year. In that time, I have written just over 74k words. One would think I am nearly done, but I feel like I am nowhere close.

I need to finish up the first draft of this novel. I know it will still need a lot of work once the first draft is complete, but I need to just finish putting the idea down on paper.

I have had a lot of setbacks including my computer completely dying on me two days after I downloaded Scrivener. My MacBook just died. I thought it was the battery, but when I took it to the Apple Genius, they told me the hard drive was caput. It would cost $475 to fix. I just moved and spent all my money moving and did not really have $500 to throw at fixing my MacBook. Furthermore, the Apple Genius said that since my computer is a 2014, it was probably best just to buy a new laptop. Well, if I don’t have $500 to throw at a laptop…do I really need to finish that thought?

So, I saved up my pennies for a month and cashed in some work bennies to get some gift cards and scraped up enough to fix my laptop. I took it back to Apple, plugged it and bing! It booted up.

WTF, seriously?

I could not get logged in using my password and the system would not let me use my Apple ID to change my password. FFS.

The Apple Genius tried everything to circumvent the password problem, but finally after two hours, we just had to wipe the whole computer and reload it.

AHHHHHHH!!!!!!!! NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

OK, after I freaked out inside my head, I calmed down as I had very wisely listened to my brother who had told me a year previous to back-up everything on the cloud, including, thank heavens, my novel.

So, I held my breath and let him wipe my computer. Miraculously, it still works. I do not know how long I have, but a friend of mine has offered to help me replace the SSD card which should give me some more time on this laptop.

See how easy it was for me to get distracted from my novel? I am writing this post to tell you about my novel and Nanowrimo and instead I fell into the laptop hell I experienced.

So, here it is. I am going to use Nano to finish up my first draft. I may not reach the 50K mark on Nano as I am not going to include any of the stuff I have already written. I probably have 25k-30k left to write. But who knows, I may just go ahead and keep on writing and get started on the 2nd installment of the novel just to get me up to 50k. I have already decided the story is going to be a trilogy.

If you are on the Nanowrimo site and participating in National Novel Writing Month, my user name is morgaine84. Add me to your buddy list and follow my progress. I’ll follow you back and maybe we can encourage each other to keep on going through the month.

Anyone who knows me or has ever read anything on my blog, knows that I am a fan of books made into movies. I love books. I love movies. Combining those two loves for me is everything.

I long ago gave up the idea that the movie needs to march through every plot point the way the book does. And I am OK with substantial changes as long as the main storyline, story arc, plot, and resolution are honored in the movie version of the story.

For me, the best book to movie adaptation in faithfully following the book is Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, which is based on Edith Wharton’s book of the same name. And my favorite book-to-movie adaptation that follow’s the spirit of the book while making major changes to the story is Peter Jackson’s telling of The Lord of the Rings.

That said, I am so ready to see Ready Player One.

I really loved the book. I thought the ending of chapter one of the book was the best chapter ending I’ve ever read and truly set up the excitement for the rest of the book.

“This message had been embedded in the log-in sequence by James Halliday himself, when he’d first programmed the OASIS, as an homage to the simulation’s direct ancestors, the coin-operated video games of his youth. These three words were always the last thing an OASIS user saw before leaving the real world and entering the virtual one:

READY PLAYER ONE”

Bam!

That right there. Those three little words. I couldn’t wait to turn the next page to fall into Ernest Cline’s world that was the OASIS. I had the same feeling of excitement as I had playing arcade games as a child. Those three little words were what every video gamer in the 80s saw before they started playing their favorite arcade game. They waited for those words. They were excited by them. They could not wait to read them so their gaming experience could begin. This time, they would make the next level in Pac-Man. This time their frog would beat the traffic. This time…

I took the leap and turned the page.

I thought it was a fun read and a bit of a modern-day telling of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The author also captured the culture of the 1980s, the era of my youth, in a magical way. The arcade video games, groundbreaking movies, the music, the rise of early home computers, and gaming were on display in their full glory and being experienced by someone who was a true fan. Parzival, (Wade Watts), was as obsessed with the era as he was with his idol, James Halliday, the creator of the OASIS.

Steven Spielberg’s movies played a pretty big role in the book. And I am absolutely thrilled he has decided to take on this project.

I have been reading some of the reviews online. People are already complaining that the movie is substantially different from the book. I am OK with that. As long as the Spielberg’s rendition is true to the spirit of the book, I am sure it is a movie that I will enjoy seeing again and again.

Quick confession: In addition to writing, reading, biking, weight loss blogging, I am also a bit of a game nerd. Well, OK, I’m a huge game nerd.

I played D&D in college and for several years thereafter. I’ve played Call of Cthulu and several other RPGs, (that’s role-playing games for the non gamers among you). I even gamed pretty heavily in World of Warcraft for several years. I have tried many other MMORPGs, (massively, multiplayer online role playing games…aka many men online role playing girls), as well, but WoW was pretty much my mainstay.

I have not really gamed in a long, long time. I have many gamer friends who have tried to get me back into gaming, but with all else I do, I have not really been that interested, nor do I have a lot of time to devote to gaming.

One of the things I like best about role-playing games is that at the end of the day, they are just one big interactive story-telling/creating event. I love that. Yes, we use dice, and math, and stats, and fight about rules, (OMG do we ever fight about rules!), but my favorite part of the game is the story we create together, even if that story is all about our interactions with each other and the crazy ideas we come up with.

This past weekend, I did one thing all game nerds eventually do, I went to a gaming convention. This one is PrinceCon. It is run by Princeton alumni & students, of course, but certainly not limited to them.

A friend of mine from high school went to Princeton and was a member of their student gaming group. He is now one of the organizers and leads some of the games, (DM or GM in game-speak). He invited me to attend. My first instinct was to say no, but I went. And I’m glad I did.

Their game is run differently than any game I’ve played in the past. They have their own con rules, which is not unusual. Their DMs run individual games, but they are all nominally connected by one overarching plot. So, as you are resolving plot lines in your individual game, you are also collecting clues to the “meta-game.” The last day of the con was basically spent resolving the meta-game plot lines to save the Multiverse.

Basically, they drew together several of the worlds they ran games for in previous years and created the “multiverse.” DMs ran players through games in each world. We resolved plot lines within each of those worlds, collected clues that led us to believe someone was trying to destroy the multiverse, and then used those clues to stop him. The clues we collected created the “Hitchhiker’s Guide” and gave us code words to make travel to/from each world easier so we could go collect the items we needed to stop the top bad guy.

I think the organizers are going to write a summation of all of the events on their website soon…and by soon I mean sometime between now and next year’s con. I do not have all of the details of all of the games, mainly the ones I was involved in and what other players told me happened in theirs. So, for me to do a complete write-up here would not do the event justice.

It was a lot of fun. Probably the most fun I’ve had gaming in a long time. I really enjoyed the layered nature of their game. I’ve never experienced another game like it. I had a really good gaming group for many years and we definitely had a lot of great games and storylines, but nothing as complex as the PrinceCon event.

I want to try to go next year. I may not get into gaming too much in between now and then. Or I could. Who knows. But it was nice to explore the gaming world again, even if for just one weekend.